The Chairs

A guitar club, a borrowed chair and a hiatus

The three members met at school through a guitar club and started writing and arranging together after sitting their university entrance exams, working through singing contests before there was any thought of a record. The name came out of a rehearsal: they were using an IKEA chair as percussion, and it stuck.

The line-up has not changed since. Qiu Yung-ching and Chen Chung-ying both sing and play guitar, which is the band's defining structural oddity — two front voices sharing the same songs rather than one singer and one harmoniser — and Sun Po-yuan plays bass, credited on overseas festival listings as Benson. They are based in Taipei, a city Yung-ching has described as a mixture of everything, with buildings from different eras standing side by side, and their records sound like that: Mandarin, Taiwanese, English and Japanese all turn up in the lyrics.

The debut, Cheers!Land, arrived in 2016. The band took a short break in 2018, the same year they released Lovely Sunday, and it was that album that won Best Vocal Group at the 30th Golden Melody Awards in 2019 — the prize that made them a name outside the Taipei live circuit.

The records that got them out of Taiwan

A third album, Real Love Is…, carried its own Taiwanese tour. The turn outwards came with the July 2022 record released domestically as 香格里拉的呼喚 and internationally as Shangri-La is Calling, which they took to more than twenty cities across the United States, Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia.

Japan became the most regular overseas market. In July 2023 they played Shibuya WWW in Tokyo on the 11th, Tsukimiru Kimi Omou on the 12th, KDJAPON in Nagoya on the 13th and UrBANGUILD in Kyoto on the 14th, alongside a slot at the Tsukuba rock festival GFB'23 in Ibaraki. A ten-track vinyl pressing, Hey Aries, came out in Japan on 28 June 2023 in a clear green edition, following a digital single of the same name on 5 May.

Since then the festival run has widened again: Big Mountain in Thailand, Reeperbahn in Hamburg, an ASEAN music showcase and Peacetrain in South Korea. The band's own account of those shows is that playing to rooms with no Mandarin in them changed what they thought their songs could do.

The stated influences are unfashionably direct — Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, ELO's Time, Arctic Monkeys' AM — and the records bear it out: sixties and seventies psychedelic pop arrangements under soft-rock melodies, with the two voices weaving rather than stacking.

A fire, a break-up and ten acts

The sixth album, 愛的對白 (Love Dialogue), came out in July 2025 and is built as a script: ten songs presented as ten scenes, moving from wide social observation towards something spoken to one person. Both singers wrote throughout, and they were in opposite emotional states while doing it — one in a new relationship, the other coming out of a break-up — which is why the record argues with itself.

It was made under worse conditions than that suggests. A fire tore through the band's recording studio in 2024, and the Golden Melody trophy they had won in 2019 came out of it as a charred remnant. Producer Jung-yi has said that finishing the album after that counted as the achievement. The band's own framing is less about damage than about what the fire reordered: 〈倖存者〉 (Survivor), 〈生份的你〉 and 〈阿May〉 all address suffering head-on, but Yung-ching describes the register as warm orange light rather than darkness.

The album also abandons the omniscient narrator the band had leaned on before. 〈Sorry Folks… the host is gone〉 opens it by watching life as theatre; 〈人去樓空〉, drawn from a bad period in Chung-ying's life, gave the album its title; 〈生份的你〉 is a rare Taiwanese-language lyric set to a rock arrangement; and the closer, 〈想和你說說話〉, ends by simply saying I love you, which Yung-ching has called a reconciliation with his more cynical younger self.

The physical release extends the conceit. Its design started from a Polaroid the band found in Hamburg, and the package includes actors' audition cards and script pages, with 〈人去樓空〉 printed on a leaf meant to be torn out, so that one of the dialogues physically disappears.

Where they stand in September 2026

Love Dialogue put them back in the Golden Melody shortlist. At the 37th awards in 2026 they were nominated for Best Vocal Group against 頑童MJ116, 凹與山, Dac & Zaoyuan and GENBLUE 幻藍小熊 — the last of whom won, for MIRROR. It was the band's second nomination, seven years after their second album got the first. Chung-ying's response was that the distance from that record to this one had been a substantial change; Po-yuan said ten years had been quite a journey and that the news did not feel real until friends started sharing it.

Commercially the position is stronger than the shortlist implies. The Love Dialogue run was their first tour at the 4,000-ticket scale across the whole run, and every date sold out as soon as it went on sale. The Taipei show, on 11 October 2025 at the 2,000-capacity Legacy TERA, was their first at that size and played the new album in full, with 心頭肉 MindBodySoul opening; tickets had gone up on 15 August 2025. The tour carried into 2026 with a Legacy Taichung date on 3 January, doors at 19:00 and stage at 20:00, at NT$1,300 in advance and NT$1,500 on the door, plus a Kaohsiung night later that month.

The current news is the tenth-anniversary single. 〈Rolling On, Marching On〉 was released in early September 2026, and the anniversary tour was announced with it on 9 September. Yung-ching hummed the melody while riding a YouBike through Taipei with piano textbooks on his back, took The Magnetic Fields' The Book of Love as a starting point, and first sang a lower-voiced version that friends told him sounded like a sixty-year-old. The final take puts both singers in conversation and sends Po-yuan up into the high register.

He played it to the other two for the first time at the band's spring gathering, which doubled as the reopening party for the rebuilt studio, having smuggled in a guitar, a PA and lyric slides. He has described that performance as a confession or a proposal to the band, and more frightening than any public show; Chung-ying's reaction was simply how moving it was, Po-yuan cried, and the three of them took a Polaroid.

The anniversary run

The tour that follows is called Rolling On, Marching On, after the single, and it is a Taiwan-only run so far: Legacy TERA in Taipei on 13 and 14 November 2026, LIVE WAREHOUSE in Kaohsiung on 21 November, and Legacy Taichung on 28 and 29 November. Every night starts at 20:00.

Tickets went on general sale at noon on 11 September 2026 through KKTIX and FamilyMart counters, with the added dates released at noon on 16 September, capped at four per account and requiring one ticket per person at the door. Standard admission is NT$1,500, pairs are NT$1,350 a head, accessible tickets NT$750, and anything left on the night costs NT$1,700.

No overseas leg has been announced, and international listings show nothing outside Taiwan at present — the band's last documented run beyond it was the 2023 Asia-Pacific stretch. They record on the Taipei label Sound of Tomorrow, which also promotes the shows.